In the real or imagined abundance of the ‘consumer society’, Time occupies something of a privileged place. The demand for that very special kind of good equals the demand for almost all the others taken together. There is, of course, no more an equality of opportunity – or democracy – of free time than there is of other goods and services. Moreover, we know that, though it has some significance between periods or between cultures, the accounting of free time in chronometric units is not at all meaningful for us as an absolute value: the quality of that free time, its rhythm and its contents, and whether it is residual to the demands of work or ‘autonomous’, are all things which make a difference between particular individuals, categories or classes. And even the excess of work and the lack of leisure can become the privilege of the manager or of the high-ranking official. In spite of these disparities, which would only assume their full meaning within a differential theory of signs of status (of which ‘consumed’ free time is a part), the fact remains that time retains a particular mythic value for its equalizing of human conditions, a value which has been taken up again strongly and thematized in our own day in the concept of leisure time. The old adage that ‘all men are equal before time and death’, which once encapsulated in its entirety the demand for social justice, today lives on in the carefully tended myth that all are equal in leisure.
Going harpoon fishing together and sharing the Samos wine created a deep sense of fellow-feeling. On the boat back, they realized that they knew each other only by their Christian names and, wishing to exchange addresses, discovered to their amazement that they worked in the same factory, the one as technical director, the other as nightwatchman.
This delightful little fable, which sums up the entire ideology of the Club Méditerranée, involves several metaphysical postulates:
This last point is the key one: it hints at the fact that time might well be only the product of a certain culture and, more precisely, of a certain mode of production. In that case, it is necessarily subject to the same status as all the goods produced or available within the framework of that system of production: that of property, private or public, that of appropriation, that of the object, possessed and alienable, alienated or free, and, like all objects produced by that systematic mode, partaking of the reified abstraction of exchange-value.
Of most objects, one can still say that they have a certain use-value, which is in theory dissociable from their exchange-value. But is this true of time? Where is the use-value that could be defined by some objective function or specific practice? For this is the exigency which lies at the bottom of ‘free’ time: that we restore to time its use-value, that we liberate it as an empty dimension to fill it with its individual freedom. Now, in our system, time can only be ‘liberated’ as object, as chronometric capital of years, hours, days, weeks, to be ‘invested’ by each person ‘as he pleases’. It is already, therefore, no longer in fact ‘free’, since it is governed in its chronometry by the total abstraction which is that of the system of production.
The demand underlying leisure is, therefore, an insolubly contradictory and truly desperate one. Its fervid hope for freedom attests to the power of the system of constraints which is nowhere so total, precisely, as at the level of time. ‘When I speak of time, it is already gone,’ said Apollinaire. Of leisure we may say that ‘When you “have” time, it is no longer free.’ And the contradiction here is not one of terms, but of substance. This is the tragic paradox of consumption. Everyone wants to put – believes he has put – his desire into every object possessed, consumed, and into every minute of free time, but from every object appropriated, from every satisfaction achieved, and from every ‘available’ minute, the desire is already absent, necessarily absent. All that remains is consomme of desire.
In primitive societies there is no time. The question of whether one ‘has’ time or not has no meaning there. Time there is nothing but the rhythm of repeated collective activities (the ritual of work and of feasting). It cannot be dissociated from these activities and projected into the future, or planned and manipulated. It is not individual; it is the very rhythm of exchange which culminates in the act of feasting. There is no name for it; it merges with the verbs of exchanging, with the cycle of men and nature. It is, therefore, ‘bound’, but not constrained and this ‘binding’ (Gebundenheit) does not stand opposed to some kind of ‘freedom’. It is properly symbolic, which is to say that it cannot be abstractly isolated. But to say ‘time is symbolic’ has no meaning: it simply does not exist there, any more than does money.
The analogy between time and money is, on the other hand, fundamental to the analysis of ‘our’ times and what the great significant break between working time and free time might imply. This is a crucial break since the basic options of consumer society are based upon it.
‘Time is money’: this slogan etched in letters of fire on Remington typewriters is also written above the factory gates, and inscribed in the subjugated time of daily life, in the increasingly important notion of the ‘time-budget’. It even governs – and it is this which concerns us here -leisure and free time. And it is this slogan too which defines empty time and is etched on the beach sundials and over the entrances to the holiday villages.
Time is a rare and precious commodity, subject to the laws of exchange-value. This is clearly true of working time, since it is bought and sold. But, increasingly, free time itself has to be directly or indirectly purchased before it can be ‘consumed’. Norman Mailer has analysed the production calculation carried out on orange juice, delivered frozen or liquid (in a carton). The latter is dearer because the price includes the two minutes gained over preparing the frozen product: in this way, the consumer’s own free time is being sold to him. And there is logic in this, since ‘free’ time is in fact time ‘earned’; it is capital on which a return can be had, potential productive power, which has therefore to be bought if one is to have control of it. One could only be amazed or indignant at this if one still held to the naïve hypothesis of a ‘natural’ time, ideally neutral and available to all. The idea, which is not at all absurd, that one might be able to put a shilling in a juke-box and ‘buy back’ two minutes’ silence illustrates the same truth.
Divisible, abstract, measured time thus becomes homogeneous with the exchange-value system: it forms part of that system on the same basis as any other object. As an object of temporal calculation, it can and must be exchanged against any other commodity (in particular, money). Moreover, the notion of time-as-object [la notion de temps/objet] is a reversible one: just as time is an object, so all produced objects can be considered as crystallized time – not just labour time in the calculation of their market value, but also leisure time, in so far as technical objects ‘save’ time for those who use them and are sold on that basis. The washing machine is free time for the housewife, potential free time transformed into an object so as to be buyable and sellable (free time she may possibly take advantage of to watch TV and the adverts she can see there for washing machines!).
This law of time as exchange-value and as productive force does not stop at leisure’s doorstep, as though leisure miraculously escaped all the constraints that rule working time. The laws of the (production) system do not take holidays. On the roads, on the beaches, in the holiday villages – they everywhere continually reproduce time as productive force. The apparent division into working time and leisure time – the latter ushering in the transcendent sphere of liberty – is a myth. This grand opposition, which is increasingly fundamental at the lived level of consumer society, remains nonetheless a formal one. This gigantic orchestration of annual time into a ‘solar year’ and a ‘social year’, with the holidays as the solstice of private life and the beginning of spring as the solstice (or equinox) of collective life – this gigantic ebbing and flowing is a seasonal rhythm in appearance only. It is not a rhythm at all (a succession of natural moments of a cycle), but a functional mechanism. It is a single systematic process which splits two ways into working time and leisure time. We shall see that, as a function of this common objective logic, the norms and constraints which are those of working time are transferred to free time and its contents.
Let us return, for a moment, to the specific ideology of leisure. Rest, relaxation, escape and distraction are, perhaps, ‘needs’: but they do not in themselves define the specific exigency of leisure, which is the consumption of time. Free time is, perhaps, the entire ludic activity one fills it up with, but it is, first of all, the freedom to waste one’s time, and possibly even to ‘kill’ it, to expend it as pure loss (this is why it is insufficient to say that leisure is ‘alienated’ because it is merely the time necessary to reproduce labour power. The alienation of leisure is more profound: it does not relate to the direct subordination to working time, but is linked to the very impossibility of wasting one’s time).
The true use-value of time, the use-value which leisure desperately tries to restore, is that of being wasted.1 The holidays are this quest for a time which one can waste in the full sense of the term, without that waste entering in its turn into a process of calculation, without that time being (at the same time) in some way ‘earned’. In our system of production and productive forces, one can only earn one’s time: this fatality weighs upon leisure as it does upon work. One can only ‘exploit [faire-valoir] one’s time’, if only by making a spectacularly empty use of it. The free time of the holidays remains the private property of the holiday-maker: an object, a possession he has earned with the sweat of his brow over the year; it is something owned by him, possessed by him as he possesses his other objects – something he could not relinquish to give it or sacrifice it (as one does with objects in making gifts of them), to yield it back up to total availability, to that absence of time which would be true freedom. He is tethered to ‘his’ time as Prometheus was tethered to his rock, tethered to the Promethean myth of time as productive force.
Sisyphus, Tantalus, Prometheus: all the existential myths of ‘absurd freedom’ are reasonably accurate representations of the holiday-maker in his setting, with all his desperate efforts to imitate ‘vacation’, gratuitousness, a total dispossession, a void, a loss of himself and of his time which he cannot achieve, being, as he is, an object caught up in a definitively objectivized dimension of time.
We are in an age when men will never manage to waste enough time to be rid of the inevitability of spending their lives earning it. But you can’t throw off time like underwear. You can no longer either kill it or waste it, any more than you can money, since they are both the very expression of the exchange-value system. In the symbolic dimension, gold and money are excrement. It is the same with objectivized time. But it is, in fact, very rare – and logically impossible in the current system -for money or time to be restored to their ‘archaic’, sacrificial function of excrement. That would really be to deliver oneself of them in the symbolic mode. In the order based on calculation and capital, things are, in a sense, precisely the opposite way about: objectivized by it, and manipulated by it as exchange-value, it is we who have become the excrement of money, it is we who have become the excrement of time.
Thus, everywhere, in spite of the fiction of freedom in leisure, ‘free’ time is logically impossible: there can only be constrained time. The time of consumption is that of production. It is so to the extent that it is only ever an ‘escapist’ parenthesis in the cycle of production. But, once again, this functional complementarity (variously shared out in the different social classes) is not its essential determination. Leisure is constrained in so far as, behind its apparent gratuitousness, it faithfully reproduces all the mental and practical constraints which are those of productive time and subjugated [asservi] daily life.
It is not characterized by creative activities: creating, artistically or otherwise, is never a leisure activity. Leisure is generally characterized by regressive activities of a type pre-dating modern forms of work (pottering, handicrafts, collecting, fishing). The guiding model for free time is the only one experienced up to that point: the model of childhood. But there is confusion here between the childhood experience of freedom in play and the nostalgia for a stage of social development prior to the division of labour. In each of these cases, because the totality and spontaneity leisure seeks to restore come into being in a social time marked essentially by the modern division of labour, they take the objective form of escape and irresponsibility. Now, this irresponsibility in leisure is homologous with, and structurally complementary to, irresponsibility in work. ‘Freedom’ on the one hand, constraint on the other: the structure is, in fact, the same.
It is the very fact of the functional division between the two great modalities of time which constitutes a system and makes leisure the very ideology of alienated labour. The dichotomy establishes the same lacks and the same contradictions on both sides. So, everywhere, we find in leisure and holidays the same eager moral and idealistic pursuit of accomplishment as in the sphere of work, the same ethics of pressured performance. No more than consumption, to which it belongs entirely, is leisure a praxis of satisfaction. Or, at least, we may say that it is so only in appearance. In fact, the obsession with getting a tan, that bewildered whirl in which tourists ‘do’ Italy, Spain and all the art galleries, the gymnastics and nudity which are de rigueur under an obligatory sun and, most important of all, the smiles and unfailing joie de vivre all attest to the fact that the holiday-maker conforms in every detail to the principles of duty, sacrifice and asceticism. This is the ‘fun-morality’ Riesman speaks of, that properly ethical dimension of salvation in leisure and pleasure which no one can now escape, except by finding their salvation in other criteria of accomplishment.
The increasingly marked tendency towards the physical concentration of tourists and holiday-makers – which stands in formal contradiction to the declared motive of pursuing freedom and autonomy – obeys the same principle of constraint which is homologous with that experienced in work. Solitude is a value spoken about, but not practised. People flee work, but not physical concentration. Here again, of course, social discrimination plays its part (see Communications, 8). Sea, sand, sun and the presence of a crowd are much more necessary to holiday-makers at the bottom of the social scale than to the better-off. This is partly a question of financial resources, but, above all, it is one of cultural aspirations: ‘Subjected to passive holidays, they need the sea, the sun and the crowd to feel as though they really are somebody’ (Hubert Macé, in Communications, 10, ‘Vacances et tourisme’, 1967).
‘Leisure is a collective vocation.’ This journalistic headline perfectly sums up the institutional character, the aspect of internalized social norm which free time and its consumption have assumed, in which the privilege of enjoying snow, idleness and cosmopolitan cuisine merely masks deep compliance with:
Leisure, which is still very unequally distributed, remains, in our democratic societies, a factor of cultural distinction and selection. We may, however, envisage this trend reversing itself (at least we may imagine this): in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the Alphas are the only ones who work, the mass of the others being condemned to hedonism and leisure. We may admit that, with the progress of leisure, and the generalized ‘promotion’ of free time, there will be a reversal of this privilege and the great thing will be to set aside less and less time for obligatory consumption. If, as is probable, though it is the opposite of what are ideally their goals, leisure activities, as they develop, increasingly sink into competitiveness and the disciplinary ethic, then we may suppose that work (a certain type of work) will become the place and time in which to recover from one’s leisure. And work can even now be a mark of distinction and privilege once again, as is the case with the affected ‘servitude’ of top executives and managing directors who feel they have to work 15 hours a day.
So we come to the paradoxical end-point where it is work itself that is consumed. To the extent that work is preferred to free time, that it meets a ‘neurotic’ demand, and that the excess of it is a mark of prestige, we are in the field of the consumption of work. But we know that anything can become a consumer object.
The fact remains that today, and for long into the future, the distinctive value of leisure will remain. Even the reactional valorization of work merely proves a contrario the force of leisure as a noble value in our deepest conceptions. ‘Conspicuous abstention from labour becomes the conventional index of reputability’, writes Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Productive work is base: this tradition is still alive. It is perhaps even reinforced with the increased status competition we find in modern ‘democratic’ societies. This law of leisure-value is assuming the force of an absolute social prescription.
Leisure is not, therefore, so much a function of enjoyment of free time, satisfaction and functional repose. Its definition is that of an unproductive consumption of time. And so we come back to the ‘wasting’ of time we spoke of at the outset, though in this instance to show how consumed free time is in fact the time of a production. This time, which is economically unproductive, is the time of a production of value -distinctive value, status value, prestige value. Doing nothing (or doing nothing productive) is, in this regard, a specific activity. Producing value (signs, etc.) is an obligatory social prestation; it is the very opposite of passivity, even if the latter forms the manifest discourse of leisure. In fact, time is not ‘free’ in leisure; it is expended, and not as pure loss, because it is the moment, for the social individual, of a production of status. No one needs leisure, but all are charged to prove their freedom not to perform productive labour.
The consumation of empty time is, therefore, a kind of potlatch, in which free time serves as a material of signification and sign-exchange (in parallel with all the activities subsidiary and internal to leisure). As in Bataille’s The Accursed Share, it assumes value in its very destruction, in being sacrificed. And leisure is the site of this ‘symbolic’ operation.2
It is, therefore, within the logic of distinction and the production of value that leisure is justified in the last instance. We may verify this almost experimentally: left to his own devices, in a state of ‘creative freedom’, the leisured individual desperately seeks out a nail to bang in or an engine to strip down. Outside the competitive sphere, there are no autonomous needs, no spontaneous motivation. But still he does not give up doing nothing. Far from it. He imperiously ‘needs’ to do nothing, for this has a value of social distinction.
Still today, what the average individual seeks in his holidays and free time is not the ‘freedom to fulfil himself’ (as what? what hidden essence is going to emerge?), but to demonstrate the uselessness of his time, the excess of time he possesses as sumptuary capital, as wealth. Leisure time, like consumption time in general, is becoming the highly charged part of social time, the part productive of value – a dimension not of economic survival, but of social salvation.
We can see now what, ultimately, is the basis of the ‘freedom’ of free time. This is akin to the ‘freedom’ to work and the ‘freedom’ to consume. Just as labour has to be ‘freed’ as labour power to be able to assume economic exchange-value, and just as the consumer must be ‘freed’ as such, that is to say, left (formally) free to choose and establish preferences for the system of consumption to be established, so time has to be ‘freed’, that is to say, extricated from its (symbolic, ritual) implications to become: not only (1) a commodity (in labour time) in the cycle of economic exchange); but also, (2) a sign and sign material assuming, in leisure, a social exchange-value (ludic prestige value).
It is this last modality alone which defines consumed time. Labour time, for its part, is not ‘consumed’ – or, rather, it is consumed only in the sense that an engine consumes petrol, a sense which bears no relation to the logic of consumption. As for ‘symbolic’ time, that time which is neither economically constrained nor ‘free’ as sign-function, but bound -in other words, indissociable from the concrete cycle of nature or reciprocal social exchange – that time is clearly not ‘consumed’. In fact it is only by analogy with, and projection of, our chronometric conception that we call it ‘time’; it is a rhythm of exchange.
In an integrated and total system like ours, there cannot be any free availability of time. And leisure is not the availability of time, it is its display. Its fundamental determination is the constraint that it be different from working time. It is not, therefore, autonomous: it is defined by the absence of working time. That difference, since it constitutes the deep value of leisure, is everywhere connoted and marked with redundancy, over-exhibited. In all its signs, all its attitudes, all its practices, and in all the discourses in which it is spoken of, leisure thrives on this exhibition and over-exhibition of itself as such, this continual ostentation, this marking, this display. Everything may be taken away from it, everything stripped from it but this. It is this which defines it.